Drama Queens - Work in Progress: Gary Vaynerchuk

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Serial entrepreneur and New York Times best-selling author Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as 'Gary Vee,' currently has not one but two new books out, all while juggling multiple enterprises! Gary joins Sophia to reveal how he finds balance, the two core foundations of his life, hustle vs burnout, and what petrifies him. He also shares some of the secrets to his success, including his biggest tip: be nice! Plus, Gary chats about his new children's book, "Meet Me in the Middle," and for aspiring entrepreneurs and content creators, "Day Trading Attention," both available now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, everyone. It's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. Hello, friends. Today we are joined by a guest I am so thrilled to talk to, not only because we've been friends for a long, long time, but because I've been an admirer of his, even longer. Today's guest is none other than Gary Vee. He is a serial entrepreneur. He serves as the chairman of VaynerX, the CEO of VaynerMedia, and the creator and CEO of Vee Friends. Gary is considered one of the leading global minds on what is next in culture, business, and the internet. And today, we're going to get behind the scenes with the man publicly known as Gary Vee and learn about how his life and mission and motivation have led him to where he finds himself

today, where he's focused on kindness, making the world a better place, and figuring out how to be Gary Vaynerchuk, off the mic, off the screen, and in his life. Gary has added another business vertical to his incredible empire, and that is that he is an author. He published a book back in 2014 that was pretty beautiful. incredible and the follow-up called day-trading attention is about where he finds himself and what insights he has for all of us in the ever-evolving landscape of modern social media 10 years after he published his first book on branding and somehow while he's juggling all of these balls he's also managed to write a kid's book it's incredible it's called meet me in the

middle. It is an all-original picture book featuring Gary's beloved V-Friends characters. And it encourages young readers to see how different the world looks from another point of view with its unique two-in-one flip book format. It is so special. It's published by Harper-Collins children's books. I'm really excited about this one. Enjoy. Hi, Gary. I'm so excited you're here. Me too. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. I'm so amped. I mean, God, I feel like we've known each other for 100 years.

It's crazy that we haven't ever done each other's shows. And the fact that, you know, I've seen you more in Europe this year than I have in the States is hilarious to me. So I like getting together with you even on Zoom. Me too. Me too. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy. I mean, we have so much to talk about. You know, you are, as our friends at home know from your intro, like this incredible serial entrepreneur, you have worked in everything from, you know, wine to media. Now you're an amazing author. And it's so interesting to me that we're looking at the year where you've got these two books that could not be more different out. You wrote about day trading attention, how to actually build brain. and sales in the new social media world, which is such an area of your expertise. And you wrote a kid's book called Meet Me in the Middle. So walk me through how you managed to write, not one book, but two. And why is one of them this adorable children's book? Like, talk to me about this.

Yeah. So thank you so much for that. You know, day trading attention to your point. It's a follow-up, actually, to a book I wrote in 2014 called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. What I'm very focused, on is, I believe attention is how the world moves. You know, people don't change their mind, don't get inspired, don't buy things, don't vote for people, don't get excited about things unless they actually consume the information. That's just how the journey is. And I think so much of my career is predicated on that I think I bet on the internet and then the evolution of the internet, which is really social media in a lot of ways,

or at least one part of it, I think I had a good sense of where attention was going. And, you know, we met in those early days of where the web was starting to get attention, taking away from a world that you understand very well in television and film. But also, you know, it's not that long ago that people read magazines for real, for real. Yeah, I miss them. Us Weekly was like your Twitter stream or Instagram just 20 years ago. And so I fascinate around attention.

I built one of the largest marketing companies, independent marketing companies in the world based on it. And I felt like I had a book to write because social media has changed so much. The fact that one who's listening right now, a stay-at-home mom whose daughter just went to college, her third child, and now has real time on her hands

because she's been so committed to raising this incredible family, who equally is deeply, knowledgeable about gardening and loves it and knows it. The fact that that woman can literally make a video right now about what to do with bell peppers in the soils of Texas during the summer months, host that on TikTok and get a million views and that becomes the beginning of a process of her starting her second career

because maybe she was working prior to starting a family. I'm obviously painting a picture here. That is intoxicating to me. And five years ago, she would have had a grind three videos a day for two years to build any kind of base to kind of make that a career. Today, because of the way the algorithms work and social media works, she can be on her seventh video and it hits and it happens fast. Not that I want to teach people to be impatient because that's my great fear.

the fact that what I just said is true, it is possible if she has the talent, the charisma, the creative capability, or the knowledge, or the mix of all of them. That is a big deal, and it's a big deal for this woman that I just made up, and it's a very big deal for Coca-Cola, BMW, and it's a very big deal for this podcast

and your acting career, and it's a very big deal for my dad's new winetex.com service. Like, right now, somebody fighting to be, mayor of a small town who's down by 20 points can easily win the election if he or she gets remarkable at social media organic advertising, not even paid. And so that's why I wrote day trading attention. The thesis is that marketing and attention has changed. Social media has changed without most people realizing. It's no longer build as many followers as possible. And then a lot of people see it every time. It's make great content every day. And some of those

pieces of content can change your life or your business and I go into incredible detail the so many emails in the first couple of months or the first month of the book being out of people who really follow me who usually get

the headlines for my content or podcasts like this but I went textbook kind of with day trading attention and I'm really proud of it and it's doing very well because unfortunately under marketers can use it but small business. I mean, the local pizza shop,

the local flower shop, landscapers, dentists. I really wrote it for everybody from a 17-year-old who wants to be a famous creator, like everybody on Earth now that's 17, all the way to a CEO of Fortune 50 company. Yeah.

So I wrote it because I had something to say, which was social media's changed, and I think most of you have missed how big this change is. Let me show you how much. good at it for every platform from YouTube to TikTok to Snapchat to Instagram. That's really exciting. And, you know, what it speaks to for me is flexibility and reaction time, both of which you've

always, I think, been at the forefront of. I mean, in the almost 20 years I've known you, like, it's so cool to watch how quickly you're willing to move across all these sectors and just follow your curiosity. from this vantage point as, you know, a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur, if you got the opportunity to hang out with like eight-year-old Gary, would you see a through line? Like, would you have things to talk about with that kid? Or has your whole life just been a series of like unexpected left turns?

And now here you are. An incredible mix of the two. Eight-year-old Gary was the preview. No question. A eight-year-old, 1983-year-old, Eight-year-old Gary, I could speak to, especially if I had context, let's say I was actually me and new technology created it. I could be like, hey, bro, I know you because I am you. You know that feeling you're getting when you sell lemonade, like really, really.

And you know how much you like being nice to people. Like, you know how like the teachers like you because you stop the fights instead of starting them. That's going to be your life. Wow. that's very cool I think by eight not by six by the way but by eight just to give you context

by eight I'd already established probably the two core foundations of my life which is I love deeply love being an entrepreneur which is why I'm multi-hyphenated like if you're a pure red entrepreneur

you're too creative to I'm not doing it for the money like in the way that like of course money is a part of the equation but if I stayed in one thing, I can maximize my money potentially more, which is why so many people give you advice to focus on something. It's actually, there's a lot of truth to it. But when you start over-indexing to what I call purebred entrepreneurship, it's just too creative. And in that creativity,

you look more like a free-spirited artist. You're singing and you're doing pottery and you're trying to do acting. It's like the egot, right? Like, it's like theater. If I had your skills and I was still me, my life, I think, would be very theater and TV and film and I'll do a TV commercial and I'll do stuff with streamers and social media.

Like I think the level of curiosity and just pure joy for experiencing it, I don't love to travel. Like I don't get excited of the thought of like, let people see the pyramids or Big Ben or the rainforest, but I know many people that do.

My version of that is entrepreneurship. So by eight, that was starting to form. And then the other pillar, which is, I am very passionate about kindness. You know me well. And you know me through the eyes of many as well. Because we have enough overlap in circles. I like that people that actually know me think I'm nice.

And that matters to me heavily. And I was an eight-year-old kid. I was very emotional. I cried a lot. at seven, six, eight, nine, ten. Everything was, I was very emotionally charged. Like kids getting picked on teary-eyed me. I was so empathetic.

Yeah. I was so empathetic I could feel. And so like, yeah, I was very, I was that kid. And I feel like that's who I am. I'm proud of putting kindness as an important attribute, along with tenacity and competitiveness. And, you know, there's not being in Yang with me, right? Like, there's so much competitiveness and, like, fire and hyperness and chaos that's controlled.

I'd like to think. But there's this very soft part of, like, humanity of, like, not at the expense. I don't want anything I do to be at the expense of others. Yeah, I agree with that. And now a word from our sponsors that I really enjoy, and I think you will too. I think that's how a, you know, this sort of Venn diagram of friend groups that were a part of forms, right? It's like those sort of central tenets. I think what's been really interesting for me to start to realize is that just by nature of the way of the world, like kindness can sometimes be expected of women in ways that actually requires that we abandon ourselves.

And the really neat thing, I think, having friendships with folks like you has done for me over the years is remind me that I am absolutely allowed to set a boundary and still be a kind person. That's right. And that in certain ways, I think, when you begin to do that, you actually get kinder because it's not a default. It's a real passion and a real action. And the thing I didn't expect about learning those lessons, which are hard. You know, I hate the idea of somebody not liking me or letting somebody down, but what it's actually helped me build is more resilience and more confidence. And when you talk about how kindness and particularly self-esteem are these obsessions

of yours, like what I hear also is that creating really resilient confidence is as well. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there to unpack. So that was beautiful words. So a couple things. One, being liked and letting someone down are incredibly different. Like, for example, people have very significant hot takes on me and anybody who has any kind of awareness. Oh, yeah.

And I don't struggle with that at all because it is not based on any actual interaction. Letting people down ironically, I'm petrified of, but actually, and this is important for you to hear, and I want everyone to hear this, I stink at boundaries. I say yes all the time to think, that make absolutely no sense.

Oh, well, yeah. And I try to actually unwind it once I come to my consciousness, which then oftentimes actually makes me let people down. I have worked incredibly hard in saying no more often up front, which then eliminates letting someone down. It's ironic that, you know,

having candor like I'm not interested or I don't have time, I hate that feeling. And I do think for certain people you let them down, but you let them down so much more when you say yes and then don't deliver or are sloppy with it. I work on that every day. So I am also bad at boundaries. Many men also are bad at it. I can speak and raise my hand, even though outwardly it may seem that I'm great at it. I really struggle with that. So I really struggle with that one. Two, oh, self-esteem boy, you're right. Right. I mean, I could literally, I could literally spend the rest of my life just talking on that one topic. I believe pure self-esteem. And people get very confused because ego is perceived self-esteem that is actually insecurity disguised as self-esteem. Real self-esteem is incredible. Let me give me an example. I believe that I have real self-esteem. Before I go any further, I want everyone to know that that is, when I say that sentence, I take no credit for it. I have nothing to do with it. And when I say it,

I say it out loud strictly for one reason because my mother Tamara Vaynerchuk deserves a gold medal in parenting, an Olympic gold medal in parenting because she cultivated it. First she passed on her own natural DNA of confidence to me, but then she was the, she not only gave me the ingredients,

she cooked the meal. So I am the byproduct of being someone I'm the byproduct. So I say it comfortably because I don't think it's bravado. I don't think it's bragging. In fact, when I'm going to say it nice and slow, I take zero, zero credit for it. I have a lot of self-esteem.

Let me tell you how that shows up in a way that I never understood. From high school parties when they started getting serious sophomore year of high school to the most significant parties that happen in pop culture today with circles that I run it. If I told you, I have zero FOMO, I have zero FOMO. I never envy not being somewhere.

I never see a photo on social media of somebody in a private plane or an Ibiza or a jewelry or a watch. It never crosses my mind to think someone else's life is better. It never crosses my mind to be triggered to want less for them. In fact, pretty much most of the time, my mind goes too good for them. if they got there the right way. Yeah. And self-esteem comes in a lot of variations, but that way,

I am stunned by the envy and jealousy, currency in our society today, which is a direct link to one's anxiety and depression and happiness. And so I am so grateful for self-esteem. I'm so captivated by how one teaches it, builds it. The reason I wrote my children's book, meet me in the middle is I think it is a game of middle.

Using politics, left, right, blue, red. I believe the middle is the right answer. I believe purple is the right answer. So, for example, one of the things I'm passionate about is I believe that eighth place trophies are horrible. I started talking about this 10 years ago, and at the time, they were incredibly popular. So I actually took a lot of heat from a lot of my friends

and people that had children. but it is very clear to me that many of those friends because I have the receipts have come to see my point on this which is if we are teaching children that losing is such atrocity that we must filter with it

that it is so bad to lose that we're going to fake it because you don't trick children, they know. Yeah. And so we're teaching children to fear losing and life is predominantly losing with occasional meaningful wins.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so, you know, yes, I believe in self-esteem and I believe we've been very bad at it and I'm going very general here. I do believe the last 30 years of modern parenting has really struggled with it.

I'm devastated that social media happened during this 30-year window because every parent is blaming social, not themselves. the lack of accountability of modern parenting is extraordinary and we have a scapego and without, I mean, and so, I don't know, this is a big topic for me,

this is what's true, this definitely, most things I do entrepreneurial are basically built from a selfish and selfless framework. Right? There's like two energies in it. The Friends is my Sesame Street meets Pokemon. It is my intellectual property.

I have enormous ambitions of Disney and Marvel and anything you can think of, strawberry shortcake. That's selfish. I want to build one of the biggest valuable companies in the world on these characters. The selfless part is the Sesame Street part. While building people to fall in love with these characters, I'd like to teach people very high value attributes

that I think are important in the next 30 to 50 years of society. And I think accountability and competitiveness are good. And I think that we have shied away from both too much in the last 30 years. Agreed. And I mean, you don't just see that with our kids. You see it with grown-ass adults. Well, that's because grown-ass adults that are 36 now were parented 25 years ago with a currency that, you know, what's hard about it is it's so well-intended.

You know, parenting is a game of well-intentioned. most of the time that you only have the value of looking at it in hindsight of where you misstep, right? When you grew up poor and you go and buy your kids lots of things because you want them to not be made fun of for having hand-me-downs, that was well-intended. You were trying to protect your child

from your greatest fears and issues of growing up. When you wake up later and they're in your 20s and they're not capable of doing anything and expect you to keep giving them handouts, you're like, wait a minute, I went far and overreacted. overreacting to my pain and trauma. And so it goes back to why I believe in middle.

I don't think eighth place trophies was like, let's make our kids insecure. You know, I think it was like just trying to be like, hey, effort matters. And let's show them that effort matters. And then it just kind of got away from us. And it became delusional. I like that.

The idea that sometimes when we go in the opposite of bad, like that's actually not what the goal should be, the middle, Correcting to the middle. By the way, this is the relationship advice you'll get at therapy, right? If your spouse or partner is all the way over here on an issue raising kids,

the natural reaction for the parent that sees the world a complete other way is to go completely in the other place when in actuality, if they go to the middle, they have a better chance of getting their spouse and her child to that middle place. And this is my way, 100% what happened in politics. It was, they both pulled each other

further and further and further away. And so, look, that's a bigger issue for another day and another podcast in the realm of parenting and human mindset and really what we're talking about here, life's perspective. For example, when I hit the scene, I was very hot on hustle. And my, that was slang for 2008 had just happened. There was new jobs. The internet is on fire and it's about to explode. If you hate your job, work after work on the internet, and you can leave your toxic job and build your happy future. To me, that sounded like very practical hard work. But then we got into a culture where people were like bragging that they only slept for two hours. Yeah, bad, bad,

I constantly talked about sleeping for eight hours, but people started to manipulate the word hustle to burnout, where for me, the word hustle continues to mean hard work is part of the equation. I watched Hustle get canceled and now I see it back because it's enough years removed and it's back to meaning a good thing for men, not everyone. I'm fascinated by that.

To me, where people get out of keelter, as the thought of like, as if wanting to have a happy life, so putting in the extra effort, the extra reps, the extra readings like you do in your world, the extra hours, of analyzing that I do in my world as if that was worth it

if you were then burnt out and depressed, that's crazy that's illogical but again unfortunately we weaponize words and theories and concepts and so you know I'm incredibly passionate about getting

to the essence of it I'm not worried about the semantics of the words yeah this notion of the middle is actually kind you know, to oneself and to the rest of your business. What do you think is the importance of applying kindness in business, empathy in business, hard work versus burnout priorities in business? I'll put hard work and burnout on the shelf for a second. On that one, it's quite easy,

which is like somebody asked me the other day, is health and wellness important in business? My response was, if I'm dead, I go out of business. business. Yeah. So like like I get I kind of laugh at some of the ways that some of these things have mutated and manipulated like hard work and burnout is a very simple equation. When you love what you do for a living like many of us do that are listening right now, the cliche of like it's play not work is real. And so like it's hard to burn out when you're happy. I'll just make this very simple for everyone. If you love skiing more than anything in the world, you will ski on that mountain all day long and that's just the way it's going to be. And the same for on

entrepreneurs that love working, you will not burn out. You must watch out for burnout and things change. And maybe two years ago you liked working 10 hours a day in your startup and now you're falling in love and you only want to do seven and you have to be open for change and that's awesome. You can't be romantic about yesterday. The semantic of why I think kindness matters in business is actually remarkably less fuffy, foofy and ideological. It's actually practical. I believe the best way to build businesses is to have retention, both on the client side,

on the employee side, on the customer side. I believe kindness is 80% of the formula of why somebody will stay with you. Do you know many people, so buy their flowers from a local flower shop and pay $10 more than them driving down the street and getting it from another place that just sells,

like Costco is a great retail. They will bring in very high quality flowers, just as good, if not better, by the way, than your local florist, and it will be $10 less. But many people choose to go to the florist out of actual kindness and relationship. Kindness is a beacon of relationship. You will like people more if they are kind to you versus them being indifferent or not nice to you. It's not complicated. Yeah. Employees, I love American football, so bear with me, everyone. There's something for the offensive line if you don't know what that is. Those are the five people

that protect the quarterback from getting plummeted. Yeah. Teams that are able to keep those same five guys together for a long period of time win way more games because it's a dance.

All five of them, there's so many complicated things the defense does to trick them to be able to beat up the quarterback. So you're going in, you're swimming, you're dancing, you're blocking this guy, you're letting it go

because you know this guy behind he's going to block them and you're going to, and when you have that continuity, continuity in my company leads to so much of our growth. So I actually think kindness is just practical. And then finally, real life, this is not super complicated. People that deploy kindness get kindness back in return, people that don't, don't.

And so loneliness is bad. And even if you are effective in making money by not being kind, you're always going to end up in that Scrooge moment. and you're going to wake up and you're going to realize that nobody's around your deathbed or nobody wants to go on vacation with you or you have nobody to call and that's sad and I think that's important to understand yeah yeah on every level from the personal to the professional it changes everything when you think about how many things you work on as a as a professional how do you balance, you know, all your business verticals, your life, your personal life, your

charitable work, how do you get through the day? Macro, micro. So in the micro, ironically, I'm looking at all four of them right now. I have three admins and one sheep of staff. Four full-time, unbelievably capable human beings spent an entire life making sure I'm operating every minute to the best of my ability. that everything is on track. That's a lot of infrastructure.

So that's one of the ways I get it done. That's the micro. The macro is going to be probably one of the better moments of this podcast. The inability to judge myself when I inevitably drop balls. Why I am able to do so many things and be a Renaissance man and confuse even the most capable and successful friends I have of like, what are you doing? is grounded in two core things.

One, my lack of need of maximizing money and needing to maximize the joy of my creative process of being a businessman, aka I want to do many things, not one thing. Two, me being self-aware that that is what I'm trying to do and what I like. Thus, when I inevitably,

if you were juggling 17 crystal balls, when six of them fall on the ground and smash, I can't cry over that spilled milk because I made the bed that I'm sleeping and I decided to juggle 17 balls. My ability to not beat myself up when things don't work, fail, lose money, or crash and burn famously

is a 100% direct correlation to why I'm capable of doing it. I'd rather have 11 successful balls with six of them hitting the ground than over-cherishing one ball that never hits the ground. Right. That makes me happy.

But I'm willing to admit and argue that it doesn't mean I'm maximizing my financial upside. I'm just choosing my creative upside and the joy of the process and wanting to be 93 and not regretting. Yeah, I love that. And now a word from our sponsors who make this show possible. You know, not personalizing failures, very similarly to what you were talking about earlier, where we've made loss a bad thing. We've made failing a bad thing. It's just part of life. If we didn't judge it, imagine what we could do. Ooh, I have something so beautiful. I'm so glad you just said that. I believe the reason

most people struggle is they are judging others too much. So one of my great other superpowers that was given to me DNA-wise and then was parented and then I watched by. My example is, my mother, boy, this is really real, is one of the least judgmental people I've ever met in my life. She may have it, but she keeps it in her lockbox in her head in a real way, and it doesn't come natural to her. And I have that too. And I believe that because I don't actively judge,

that probably them very good at not judging myself. And I believe that most people, core issue in life is their judgment, of themselves. I love that. So I encourage everyone who's listening. Maybe you don't need to spend all your time deciding what your sister's doing wrong,

what your husband's doing wrong, what your boss is doing wrong. You start taking that energy away from the enormous hours that people spend on deciding what people are doing wrong that are in their inner circles or are their bosses is a profound amount of time. And if you took all that time in energy, and you focused on what you can control.

Like if you're fixated on telling your mom that your sister is doing all these things wrong with your niece and you took all those hours to then make sure that you're parenting your daughter with your beliefs in a positive energy, you're freeing up hours and hours and hours of dark negative stuff

and converting it to light positive stuff. Yeah. And that's just good for the soul. And good for everyone around you. My God, imagine if the internet could do such a thing. Most of all, good for you, because while you're judging your sister, it means that your framework on life is judgment, and you're judging yourself.

And those are the best hours. I really love that. Yeah, shifting to being a judgment-free human. Especially when you don't have content. I mean, it's one thing to judge your sister in this area that I just painted, especially if you're talking about siblings with children. That means you've known your sister for 30, 40, 50 years. What about all this judgment we have on people we've never met?

uh hello it's insane you know better than anybody i mean yeah i mean yeah i mean and forget about even like i'm not even going into like people of fame or notoriety mom just talking about even like your kid's teacher like you don't really know mrs thompson yeah i said something profound to a kid seven or profound excuse me he emailed me and said you said something profound to me and it just finally played out in my career he's been gone for seven years i got this email the other day he said gary you're you're years ago I came into your office, I don't know if you remember him, I did. I remembered him. He goes, but I didn't remember this moment. He goes, I was complaining about my boss.

And you said to me, but wait, you've loved your boss for the last three years and you've just been struggling with them for the last three months. And I said, yeah. And I said, have you contemplated at all that something crazy might be going on in their life like they're about to have a divorce or their mother just told them that they're terminally ill and the shot. the reality is changing their behavior at work. Yes. And nothing happened, meaning like he took that in. So now he segues to story.

He goes, now I'm at this new company, six years later. I've been going through the same thing. And it did end up that they, the boss, is actually terminally ill. Terrible story. Whoa, horrible. But that's it. But he said the fact that I cry, this is why email, he said, I cried because most of our team was shitting on the person,

and I've been gracious because the advice he told me seven years ago and we just all went to an office and it was the worst of the worst scenarios. Wow. Of course he was great for us for a while but has been not great at all the last three months. He's dying.

Yeah. That goes to the lack of judgment. That goes to benefit of the doubt. That goes to choosing optimism over cynicism. That goes to everything that I'm trying to stand for as a human as an operator, as an entrepreneur, and as a citizen of the world. Well, and that's just it.

You just never know what people's battles are. You never know who looks happy that's got one foot over the edge. You never know who is angry because they're suffering. Like, you just don't know. And I think to cease to judge others and perhaps through that, learn to cease to judge yourself feels like a very powerful, It's a powerful nugget of wisdom, for sure. It is my definition of how to achieve happiness.

Well, so I love that, because my next question for you was going to be, what is currently bringing you happiness? You know, as you also know, I'm a pretty public figure, but don't talk about my family much, so I'll be lightweight about this, but I have been an 11-year-old, and boy, the compounding happiness of this age range is huge. Here's a Interesting one What brings me happiness

Is that I know So I love the world And I love people One of my favorite inside jokes With my friends is I don't like animals Because I like people And they always People get very emotional

If you say you don't like dogs Yeah they do And at their tables like this I'll always Like if we're having these kind of combos Sometimes I'll say I don't like dogs And everybody freaks out

Especially if they've never met me before And they don't know my spiel on this and then everybody freaks out and you're a villain, you're the worst. And then I go into, if we loved each other by default, the way we love dogs, the world would be remarkable. I watch some of the most condescending,

cynical, manipulative, deceitful people I know because I know people. Like, we all know people. It's life. Yeah, of course. I watch how they pet dogs and interact with it versus what they do to humans and it drives me up the wall.

because it's all based on insecurity. The most insecure do the most damage. And people make them insecure because they can talk back. Yeah. And so what brings me happiness is a very weird statement. I believe that we are in an era

of 8 billion people strong that really struggled with societal shifts of the last 15 years. And I actually believe that some of this one step backwards pain is actually going to work itself out for two steps forward. Oh, from your lips, Gary. I hope so. I know we're...

And it's very hard, I get it. Like, it's not a tomorrow thing. I am on the 2050s because of the tension of the 2020s when the world looks back. I really am. And I, you know, and so I see new debates being formed new ideas being formed yeah it will be plenty of this goes back to losing will there be skinned knees yes will there'll be skinned elbows

will there'll be stitches and bruises yes and when I say that that's a very that's a very optimistic point of view on what I'm actually saying which is there will be pain yeah there will be wars there will be terrible atrocities

there will be social problems there will be, there's so much going on in the world. Yeah, it's bad. I've been very good at history my whole life. I know the proxies, the patterns that lead to things. I believe in the human race. I do not believe that we're just going to disappear next year. Like, I just don't see it.

And so I'm optimistic that a lot of people are learning a lot of lessons. Yeah. And this goes back to full tilt to the beginning. I think we're going to get back to the middle a little bit here. And I mean the world. Forget about even Americans and Democrats. Democrats. I mean, parents, I will tell you right now, me being on this podcast saying, I hate eighth place trophies, kids should leave. I'll give you another one. I think it's healthy when kids fight physically when they're little. I'm being serious. These are things that I could never say seven years ago without being completely judged as like, you're all. And today, there's a more thoughtful of like, well, Gary, I'm not sure I want my kid to punch another kid in the face, but I at least understand what you're saying. saying, which is letting real life play out instead of creating these paradigms that create falsities

has merit. Let merit ring. Let merit ring. Well, I want to give you a merit badge because sometimes when things feel really hard in the world and I wonder how we're going to get to better places, I wonder how the moral arc of the universe will be bent toward justice. I see people choosing to help and it was very cool for me as a you know person who's known you for as long as I have you know we're we're doing all of our brand work out at the big ad festival and it was so meaningful to be asked to participate in a carved out evening that you created to do something good in the world and you made this enormous commitment to charity water and to your point when we think about how we move these billions of us forward,

sometimes it's the simplest things that have the most seismic shifts. There are, you know, hundreds of millions of people in the world that don't have access to clean water. And for you to say, I'm going to build for the next 10 years with this organization working to solve that very human problem, it was really special to me. So does that feel for you like an act of kindness, empathy? paying it forward, all of the above?

And eating my own dog food. If I'm going to come on here and say, like doing the right thing, don't complain about what you can't do, control what you can control. Would I like every single person to hug and kiss every single person on earth? If you really knew me,

and you know me, know me, but I'm going to like my mom. My greatest happy place is when everyone's being kind to each other. Yeah. Will you tell us a little bit about what that commitment looks like and why you picked charity water.

Yes, I will say that. So, Vayner-X has committed to a $10 million donation over the next 10 years to help eradicate the fact that people don't have X clean water, which is about 700 million-plus people right now on Earth, can't get to get in a couple of hours, which is insane. Insane, yeah. But that was me wanting so many things to, quote-unquote, be fixed. I don't want war.

I don't want social injustice. I don't want conflict. But I'm not God. Yeah. Like, politicians can't pull that off. Like, you know, people don't understand how this really works. It's complicated. It's not as simple as like this president's things.

Like, countries are structured differently. Of course, some have more power than others, but like, it's hard. If it was easy, the presidents you love the most would have got a lot done in eight years and oftentimes they don't. This is a good. God's game, not a man and woman's game. But what is a man and woman's game is instead of crying

what Joe Biden and Donald Trump should do or what, you know, somebody else should do, why don't you ask yourself, what are you doing? Yeah. Right? Like, why don't you donate $25 to a nonprofit if you're such a goody two shoes? Oh, you say you have no money? Why not go give your physical hands and feet and work on Thanksgiving warning to people that have no food because you maybe have, food. To me, the punchline of life is, I understand what everybody else should be doing. Now let's get to you. And that was a night where I could focus on what I can do. I can't change everything, but I do think clean water is a bare minimum entry to humanity and that all of us that can should consider to figure out how to contribute. And I believe in

Scott as an operator. I don't believe those monies that I work very hard for are going in the garbage or bureaucracy. And I believe that Scott and Charity Water will do the right thing by it. And I'm very proud to do it. And I'm very, that's very nice of you to bring that up. It's beautiful. I absolutely love it. I know we're right coming to our cutoff. So I'm just going to jump to my last question for you. It's my favorite thing to ask everyone. Sitting here today, looking out at, you know, your next week, month, year, what feels like your work in progress right now? What am I working on? Yeah. What's your work in?

progress. Could be personal, professional. I talked about it earlier. I believe that candor is the unlock to happiness for a lot of people that are delusional optimistic like me. This goes back to boundaries. Candor has been a struggle for me, which is crazy because Gary Vee publicly is the king of candor. I'm Gary V with a mic on a podcast like this or on stage, King of Cander. Gary Vee is great at Cander. Gary Vaynerchuk. day to day with loved ones, friends, acquaintances, employees, executives, interns, struggles because he doesn't want to disappoint. He has too much of a superhero complexity, right?

And I think I can do it all, and I can do a lot, but I can't do it all. And then when you're trying to do it all, you sometimes let people down, and you're better off telling them the truth up front than appeasing them and trying to figure it out later and it is my work in progress. I love that. Canter. It's a good one. And I call it kind candor. Yeah. Internally in my company because I think people have weaponized candor to be rude and mean. Interesting. Yeah. Weaponized candor and you're like, they make you feel bad. They use it to politic and companies and they're like, I'm just giving you candor. No, you're not. You're being manipulative. Right. Right. It's like how people are like, Gary, just keep it real. I'm like, yeah,

a real negative. Like, you're choosing to be cynical, not optimistic. So anyway, kind candor is my ambition and my work in progress. I love it. Thank you, my friend. Love you. Thank you. Thank you.